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The Inefficiencies of Legacy Thinking
Until recently, I was working at a company that was in the process of migrating their datacenters into the cloud. Their policies, written many years ago, stated that information had to go through their corporate firewalls. During the Covid-19 outbreak that saw 95% of the workforce working from home, this was nevertheless interpreted to include…
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If Anyone Could Do It…
There is an old saying: Those who can, do… those who can’t, teach. We will get back to that in a bit. I work in an industry where ongoing training is a part of life. If I had rested on my laurels when I got my first few senior certifications, I would be searching the…
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A Clean Windows Installation…
It happens twice every year… Microsoft releases a new version of Windows 10. For most people, the new version will be installed for them automatically by whatever method they use for patch management… either Windows Update, or any of myriad enterprise deployment tools their organization uses to manage desktop operating systems. Unfortunately, due to a…
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The End of An Era… Again.
Around 2005-2006, when I was running the Montreal IT Professionals Community, Microsoft announced that due to a lawsuit from the Quebec Order of Engineers, Microsoft would be eliminating the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) designation in the province of Quebec. As a community leader I rallied against that; my position was that it would create…
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Portable Security: A walking Fortress
In January, 2018 I wrote a couple of articles about the Aegis Secure Key 3z Flash Drive from Apricorn Inc. At the time, I was extremely interested in its use as a Windows To Go (WTG) device, and in fact it tested very well for that task. The fact that Microsoft has announced they have…
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Office 365 Distribution List Question
Hey Mitch! Do you know if we can add a couple hundred users to a distribution list instead of adding them one by one? One of my help desk techs was asked to create several distribution lists with several hundred users, and they do not want to have to scroll through the user list to…
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Microsoft 365 Certified
In mid-September, the recruiting department of my company introduced me to the man who would become my manager at my new client. He told me he reviewed my CV, and did not see Microsoft Office 365 listed on it. I told him honestly that while I have worked with the technologies before, I never felt…
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Juju Revisited
It is hard to believe that thirteen years ago I sat down at the Java U café at the corner of Queen Mary Rd. and Circle Rd. in Montreal and wrote an article about superstitions. It was called Don’t Mess with Juju! and it was one of the most popular articles that I wrote that…
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Not All Docks Are Created Equal…
Last week I was onboarded at a new company. I will be working from home for the first time since I moved to California, so it was necessary to equip my home office. I should clarify, I am an employee of the company that contracts me to them, so when it comes to equipment, some…
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Shana Tova uMevurechet!
Every year at about this time I send all of my friends and loved ones a post wishing them the best for the new year. It is not always an easy task to sit down and enumerate the goods and the bads of a year. Looking back on 5779, it has been an incredibly full…
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Change the Way You Change Text
I remember when I first discovered the mail merge feature… it amazed the twelve-year-old me that I could write a letter once, and then AppleWorks would address that letter to the several hundred people in my database. I was thrilled with it. Last week, I was working with a client who moved a server. No…
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Windows to Go Lives!
Sometimes the universe is talking to me. This weekend, for reasons I cannot recall, I was thinking about the fact that Microsoft announced that it will be deprecating Windows to Go, and that sometime this fall I would be faced with the choice of either: Keeping my supported Windows 10 v1903 Windows to Go key;…
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Nothing Domestic About It
There were two more mass shootings over the past weekend. Nine are dead in Dayton, Ohio; twenty-one are dead in El Paso, Texas. The talking heads this morning were discussing and debating whether or not these incidents were acts of domestic terrorism. I want to know how anyone can argue that these were not acts…
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United Nothing: Do you really need more proof?
I have been speaking against the United Nations for decades. I did not do so out of ignorance. Aside from having taken a number of courses on the UN in college, I was a senior NCO with the Israeli Defense Forces Liaison to UN Forces (Lebanon) for a year and Liaison to UN Forces (Golan…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 